


Dark Circles

by Schrodingers_Rufus



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Dissociation, Emetophobia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Movie Night, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 23:25:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19328236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schrodingers_Rufus/pseuds/Schrodingers_Rufus
Summary: Tim has a nightmare.





	Dark Circles

Tim Wright didn’t wake up screaming. He didn’t heave over the side of the bed, a string of mucus and sour saliva dripping from his lips, didn’t rip the thin blanket away from where it was wound around his legs, didn’t wrench the door of the bathroom open to wash the sweat and the rest of it off his face. He didn’t stare at himself in the grimy mirror, dark-eyed and flushed, the vanity lights casting strange shadows under his cheekbones. He didn’t think back to the last time he’d put something into his walking carcass other than coffee and nicotine.  

There were no vanity lights. There were no stains on the comforter, no faint smell of mildew in the pillow, no rattling air conditioner under the window. This was where Tim Wright lived, and it had been for over a year.

Over a year.

Over a year meant how many—meant five years since the bloodstain on the concrete, since the camera next to it, still recording.

Five years. Five years, one, two, three, four, five, six months.

_Stop it._

Jay was gone. Tim knew this—he _saw_ it. He saw the body. He was gone.

Five years, six months. Six months, something about six months.

_Shut up. You didn’t do this before._

Five, six. Two couldn’t make a pattern. Two didn’t mean anything, so that couldn’t be it. It was the six that was important, anyway.

_The six is bullshit, and so’s the two and the five. Go to sleep._

Tim Wright grit his teeth, scrubbed at his eyes, and reached for the orange bottle on his nightstand. There was a half-full glass of water next to it, but he knew better. He could barely pry the lid off the bottle; he didn’t trust himself to hold a glass steady.

The pill scraped his throat, but it stayed down. Tim screwed his eyes shut, pressed his palms against his face, took a long moment to breathe.

There was a knock at his bedroom door.

Tim jolted, his elbow slamming into the corner of the nightstand. The water tipped, wobbled, but it stayed upright, and _goddamnit, you fucking idiot, six months._

The knock started up again, more insistent this time.

“Yeah?” Tim croaked, throat still dry.

The knocking fell silent.

Tim opened his mouth to ask again, when he heard a low stammering from the other side of the door.

“You—you, uh. You alright?” Jay Merrick asked.

Six months. Six months since this nosy asshole managed to crawl his way out of the grave. Six months since the two weeks Tim called out sick, filled up the tank, and drove to Rosswood without pulling off the interstate, six months since he realized he couldn’t afford the rent after the dock in his paycheck if he didn’t find a roommate. Five months since the black eye, since the bruises and the cracked lens, since they drew up the capital-A Agreement.

Six months wasn’t much. Easy to forget things, to fall back into old habits—or new ones. That’s the cost of hanging around the wrong people.

“Yeah, I’m. ‘M fine.”

Clearly Jay wasn’t convinced. The doorknob turned, and the hinges creaked, and the door opened a fraction of an inch before snapping shut, as if Tim wouldn’t notice.  

Tim took a deep breath, throttled the urge to say something he’d regret.

Instead, he reached under the lampshade and turned on the light. “You can come in.”

“Wait, really?”

“ _Yeah,_ really,” Tim couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm from bleeding through.

The lens entered first, then a pale face, illuminated by the viewfinder screen.

No red light this time. _He’s learning._

Tim sighed, running a hand through his hair before focusing back on Jay—Jay _himself_ , not the camera.

“Why’re you here.” It’s barely a question.

“I, uh.” Jay fidgeted, spidery fingers digging into the velcro of the camera strap. He still didn’t look up. “I heard the—the pills. The bottle of pills, through the wall.”

“Through the wall.”  
  
“ _Yes._ ” Jay drew himself up incrementally taller, as if it would make a single word of his bullshit more convincing.

“And it woke you up. Through the wall.”

Jay finally looked up, eyes flashing. He paused, his finger twitching over the zoom, visibly considering his words. “No.”  
  
“Uh- _huh._ ”  
  
“Shut up.”

“Gladly.”

Jay sputtered, but didn’t reply. In turn, Tim kept his mouth shut, kept his face blank, dutifully strangled that small, muffled part of him that derived something like amusement from all this. That part of him was a lonely bastard, and it wasn’t worth listening to.

Jay broke first.

“I lost track of time. That’s _it._ ”

“Doing what?”

“I dunno, reading...forums? Browsing...stuff?”

Despite everything, Tim believed him. He would have known if Jay got any footage worth uploading; they hadn’t run into any trouble in months. Beyond that, he still had the channel and the Twitter account set to send him notifications.

Tim reached over to his nightstand, unlocked his phone. Sighed.

“Jay, it’s four in the morning.”

“Yeah, I _know,_ ” Jay spat.  

“Why don’t you just go back to—”  
  
Jay cut through, insistent. “Look, I know what I heard.”  
  
“Yeah, you heard my pills.” Tim rattled the bottle, eyebrows raised. He had the sudden, sickly feeling he was starting to lose control of the situation. “The pills I take every night.”

“You already took one tonight.”

“Yeah, and _sometimes I need more._ ”

Jay looked up from the viewfinder, face flushed and patchy, and made full, unblinking eye contact. “ _Tim._ ”

Tim’s stomach dropped. “No. _No._ I told you—”

“You _said_ it wouldn’t happen again.”

“And it’s not!” Tim’s voice cracked, the sting enough to make him wince. “That’s not what this is.”  
  
“ _Then what is it?_ ”  
  
“I had a bad night, alright?” Tim snapped. It was the wrong thing to say.

The red light blinked on. “Bad, how?”

“Bad, like— _shut that off._ ”

“Tim, I need to know if—”  
  
“ _Not like that._ ” That should have been enough. That was part of the Agreement.

Tim could see Jay shaking, shoulders hiked up, knees locked. The lens stayed steady.

With a soft, mechanical whistle, the red light disappeared.

Finally, Jay spoke again, his head held at an odd angle as he peered at Tim through the low light. “Like what?”

_Like you were still gone. Like my head started trying to fill in the gaps._

They’d never really talked about it. They’d never _had_ to talk about it. An old memory—a memory in second-person, some footage he found on one of Jay’s drives once he dug his laptop out of the trunk of a dead man’s car, marked as “IGNORE” in the filename, but not deleted or transferred yet—filtered back to him.

_“Jay?”_

_“Yeah?”_

_“Is that…? No, no, no—”_

_“Tim, what—?”_

_“That’s you?”_

_“Yeah, it’s...it’s me. Who, uh—you expecting somebody else?”_

_“You’re here?”_

_“I mean, yeah.”_

_“Thought you were gone.”_  
  
_“Well...I’m not, so...”_  
_  
_ “Okay.”

_“Okay?”_

_“Yeah, I’m okay. Go back to sleep.”_

“Like...Meridian. May third, tape six.” It was a unique identifier, a filename, following Jay’s old system. Tim was the one speaking, sure, but he wasn’t sure if that part was _him_ , exactly, or the one who picked up that bloodstained camera, wrote the title cards, kept the channel running, started to carry an old flip-knife.

Sometimes he found it useful to think about it that way, to think about it in terms of him and _not-him._

More often it made things worse.

_That pill better kick in soon._

Jay’s face lit up with recognition, just for a moment, before swiftly darkening as the full context set in. He swayed on his feet. “Oh.”  
  
“Yeah _._ ” It felt unnatural, talking about it like this. It was an extra degree of removal, a reference instead of the real thing, another step beyond their usual shorthand. Jay seemed to get it, though.

Jay watched him through the viewfinder, squinting into the light. Tim could almost hear the gears turning in his head, could see him trying to line the details of this disaster of a night up like puzzle pieces, like salvaged clips of a corrupted video. Tim knew what was coming next. Jay would lay out the facts: _I’m obviously not gone. Doubling your dose isn’t worth the risk. We should both go back to bed; nothing good happens after 2 a.m._ Tim would get pissed off. Jay would keep talking until he shoved his foot even further down his throat. They’d give up. They’d go to bed.

Jay looked up, looked right at Tim. “You, uh...you wanna watch a movie?”

Tim blinked. “What?”

“I mean, it’s...” Jay’s focus hit the floor. “It’s whatever, but, like...”

“Why?“  
  
‘Neither of us are going to bed, anyway, so, uh. I dunno. I just thought, like, it might...“

 _Help._ He thought it might help.

Huh.

Tim slowly levered himself up and off the bed, the mattress squealing beneath him. “What kind’re you thinking?”  
  
Jay’s eyes widened, stumbling back and towards the living room as Tim approached the door. Clearly he hadn’t planned this far ahead. “I dunno, something stupid.”

“Stupid’s good.” Despite his better judgment, Tim followed Jay to the couch, sinking into the cushions as he switched on the TV.

Jay started rifling through the pile of DVDs roughly stacked next to the TV stand; he’d picked them up from discount bins, from yard sales, from anywhere he could grab a movie for a couple bucks. Tim hadn’t seen most of them. He doubted Jay had either.

“There’s, uh, there’s this...there’s some bad slasher movies, but that’s...no, so, uh...This one’s shit; why do we even have this one? No, no, good but no...”

Tim felt his eyelids start to droop.  
  
“So we got some--some choices, and...Tim?”  
  
“I’m awake.”  
  
“You ever see any of the Godzilla movies?”

Tim knew what Godzilla _was,_ technically, if only from existing near Brian’s stoner friends long enough to hear them debate theoretical battles. There was something else, though, something earlier. Something on tape, on a television on a cart, rolled out in the common room in the pediatric ward. He’d been too old for it, for _dumb kid movies,_ but he watched anyway.  
  
“Didn’t it have, like...babies in the sewers or something?”

“Oh my god.” Jay stopped cold, and Tim blinked, because for all the world it looked like Jay was almost _grinning._ ”Yeah, screw it, we’re watching Godzilla.”

“We are?”  
  
“Sure, but, like...” Jay talked like there was some massive joke Tim hadn’t been let in on yet. It wasn’t the first time Tim had gotten that feeling, but it might have been the first time he’d gotten it from Jay. “ _...Real_ Godzilla.”  
  
“So I saw fake Godzilla.”  
  
“You saw _American_ Godzilla.”  
  
“God, no wonder you and Alex got along.”

There was a moment, just a fraction of a second where they both froze, looked at each other...and something quirked in Jay’s face, something rose in Tim’s gut, something right on the edge of hysteria.

They let it pass.

Jay clicked the disk into the tray.

Squinting through the dark at the case in Jay’s hand, Tim could barely make out the title.  
  
“Godzilla versus...Monster Zero?” It sounded even stranger out loud.  
  
“I said it was real Godzilla, not good Godzilla.” Jay insisted, flopping down onto the opposite end of the couch like a limp ragdoll. “But also Monster Zero’s kinda the _best_ , so...” Jay shrugged.

Helpless before such a convincing argument, Tim shrugged right back.

The opening credits rolled in garish, old-movie color, the music swelled, and as an _actual theremin_ cut in, an odd feeling settled into Tim’s gut. Through unconvincing spaceships, through stiff acting and worse writing and unexpectedly satisfying monster brawls and the way Jay turned to watch Tim expectantly just as Godzilla broke into _choreographed dance_ , the feeling only got stronger. By the final credits, Tim thought he might have come up with a name for it.

Real.

The two of them on this couch, watching monsters punch each other while the sky turned from black to pink to blue, felt more real than anything had in a long goddamn time.

For once, maybe Jay was onto something.

**Author's Note:**

> If somebody on the street asked Jay's favorite movie, he'd say it was _Eraserhead._
> 
> When Tim asked his favorite movie, he said it was _Plan 9 from Outer Space._


End file.
